Stephen Aron

They were more handsome in movies, I think.

I mean, certainly most people knew to band together that doing it as a solo venture was not a wise idea.

Yeah.

That for a variety of reasons, people typically formed companies together, often signing various kinds of contracts and compacts about who would do what on the trail and how they would associate and what kinds of arrangements would prevail.

Oftentimes, especially by the later 1840s into the 1850s, established guides who made it a living, basically,

Shepherding these caravans of wagon trains across the plains, across the mountains, across the intermountain desert and bringing them into the Pacific slope lands.

got larger and larger, especially later and later.

In the early days, you know, it would be handfuls of wagons.

But by the 1840s, sometimes the trains, especially at the height of the California Gold Rush years, when tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands in a few years across the early 1850s, late 1840s, early 1850s, were headed west.

Sometimes the wagon trains stretched miles and miles away.

These were huge caravans by the height of the trail migration period.

And you can imagine here, just imagine the dust that's kicked up by those kind of, sort of, and look, imagine what it was from the perspective of Native Americans

On these lands, watching people cross through their territories.

And that actually is a really important question about their relations with native peoples along the way.

No, no.

Oh, look, it's the same thing that cowboys who rode in the rear of cattle migrations up from Texas into Kansas, for example, the least attractive job was the cattle herder who was at the back of the herd.

And likewise, riding in the back of these caravans was not necessarily the most pleasant experience in terms of dust and the other things that livestock emit.

Well, first of all, I think it's really important to make clear, certainly Lewis and Clark's journals and their stories are important, but it's very also important that while fur traders follow the Missouri River up into the mountains to sort of trap beaver and the like in the 1820s and 1830s, by the 1840s, the principal trails do not follow the route that Lewis and Clark pioneered.

That is, if those wagon trains had tried to go where Lewis and Clark

had gone up the Missouri and then the tributarism across the Bitterroots, they would not have made it.